Do you remember that old riddle about a dangerous car crash in which a father perishes and his son is rushed into the emergency room? The on-call surgeon comes over, sees the patient and says, “I can’t operate on this boy! He’s my son!” The listener is supposed to be stumped at how that’s possible since the father is dead.

The answer, of course, is that the doctor is his mother.

In 2025, the shock of that reveal would be more of a shrug. But when Kay White Drew went to medical school in Baltimore in the 1970s, the solution would not have been so obvious. And as some members of society want to take us back to those days, Drew thinks her memoir about her medical school days is right on time.

“Everyone has to be able to do their thing. It doesn’t matter what your gender or gender identity or your race or anything else is. I feel very strongly that this message needs to get out there,” said Drew, a retired neonatologist and author of “Stress Test.”

The book follows her training at the University of Maryland School of Medicine at a time of great social upheaval, between the Civil Rights era and the fight for women’s rights.

Drew, who grew up in the small Frederick County community of Libertytown and now lives in Rockville, will discuss the book and her time in Baltimore this Saturday at the Light Street Branch of the Enoch Pratt Free Library.

“I really had never processed that time,” said Drew, who would go on to be affiliated with Georgetown University Medical Center, Children’s National Medical Center, and Johns Hopkins Medical Center. “It was so challenging for me and I had a lot of feelings about it.”

Drew’s relationship with her mother looms large over “Stress Test.” She believes her mom may have wanted to be a doctor herself, but was unable, so medical school “became her agenda for me.” Her mother, who had cancer, lived long enough to know Drew got in, but died before she graduated.

Her destiny as a doctor seemed inevitable. The memoir starts with Drew’s first glimpse of her future as a soon-to-be high school senior whose college-age boyfriend snuck her into the observation area of a gallbladder surgery. At first repulsed, she was eventually transfixed by what she saw,

“I wanted to know more about what went on inside our bodies,” she wrote. “I wanted to learn what those people in the operation room knew.”

Societal change was everywhere, both in her schooling and out in the world. In the first chapter of her book, she writes of her family watching the Watergate hearings while she was focused on dissecting rats for her summer lab job. “I was preoccupied with my own life,” she said.

But it doesn’t mean she wasn’t acutely aware of the stakes. “The aspect of women’s rights was what I was most in touch with because of my own experience, and how difficult it was to deal with sexism.”

There is a famous scene in the early seasons of “Law & Order” where an assistant distant attorney is told he must decide whether he sees himself as a Black man who is a lawyer or a lawyer who happens to be Black. “I fell more in the camp of a woman who happened to be a doctor,” Drew said. “It was hard for me to see myself primarily as a doctor. There were so few [female doctors].”

Drew, a graduate of all-female Wellesley College, admitted she didn’t have a “realistic expectation” of what it would mean to immerse herself in a mostly male educational situation and profession. “I didn’t really have a clue of what it was going to be like.”

Boy, did she find out.

She writes about moving into the third-story Baltimore walk-up where she lived during school, only to be greeted with “You must be the girl medical student” by one of her new male housemates. Another, she wrote, processed the news “as if a bee had flown into his face.”

That wouldn’t be the last obstacle. Drew told me there was a male friend she writes about whom she dated, although she left that detail out of the book. The relationship didn’t work out because he couldn’t handle it. “He was threatened by me being a woman doctor, that this whole thing wasn’t going to work out for him,” she said.

Drew writes candidly about other romantic endeavors, including one with a Black professor. She said she included these relationships in the book because she refused to believe being taken seriously as a doctor had to be at the expense of her sexuality and full humanity. “My feeling was that I had to prove myself as a woman,” she said. “That was a big deal to me.”

Initially, the purpose of the book was to serve as a reminder to readers: “Doctors are human, that it is a lot of emotional work, as well as a lot of work work, being up all night and that sort of thing.” But in the current political climate, she thinks the message of being a “girl medical student” who lives her dream is even more important.

“We should all be able to aspire to what we want to do and not be put into categories,” Drew said. “And know that women deserve to have a place that’s equal to men.”